 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today we're taking our pencils to the Christmas tree farm. I am a huge fan of Stacey Akula's art and she's got some new designs out at Purple Onion and they just came out. Are they not adorable? There's a sled and the sleigh and the horse are all one stamp and I just did a little tiny bit of masking to put the little bunny who's got his little hands out there ready to hold the reins inside the sleigh. So this is a really easy one to get the stamping portion done for. I did wipe off a little bit of the bottom of each of the stamps so that there was no bottom edge and it will look like they're in the snow rather than sitting on top of the snow. I'm using some baby oil and a blending stump to blend in my colored pencil. And you can use Gemsol but I like baby oil, it just smells better, I don't know. You can use either one, they work about the same and you just put your layers of color down and you go over top of it with the blending stump. I have a little cotton ball that's in my little container so that it doesn't slosh around in there and I don't end up with goop in there but it stays really moist and I can just tap it on there and get just a little bit on the end of my blending stump. So I am using Polychromos pencils this time and out of all the colored pencils, brands and stuff, I do have three of them. I have the Prismacolors and those are, they tend to be my favorite. These are another favorite and I also have the Luminance which is another favorite. They're all favorites because who can choose between your children, right? And if you have Prismacolors I always tell people don't feel the need to go get Polychromos as well. There are some people who will swear that they are better and whatever than others. They're a little bit different but I don't see that you need to scrap a whole box of pencils, a whole pack of them because there's something slightly different out there. So get whatever you can get to do your coloring and get busy coloring and don't worry about your supplies quite so much. There are hex charts for each of those three brands since I do have all of each of the brands over on my blog but they're also currently, I moved them over to art-classes.com. So people who are going to take the Color Pencil Jumpstart class can also get the hex chart in one purchase rather than having to go to my blog for one and go over to the teaching site for another and it also behooves me to mention to you right now that if you purchased any of the hex charts on my blog those purchases stay there even if your class has moved over to the teaching site because it was just way too much to try to move all those purchases as well. So there we go. I'm speeding through the coloring of this portion because I really want to focus on the tree part when we get to that. So that's kind of why I'm not really talking through very much. The light on this I'm having come from the front of the bunny so that's where kind of the highlights are. I colored some wood by layering some colors and that's generally what I like to do with Color Pencil is layer colors on there. It means that I don't have to press really hard with my hand in any particular layer so my hand doesn't get tired and it gives me some really nice and interesting texture. On this card I'm going to have some different textures. So I'm using my blending stump on a lot of these portions but I am going to leave just pencil on the tree and I have another card that I'm going to show you at the end too that smooths out the color on the tree so you're going to be able to see whether or not you want to do the blending to do that or if you just want to let the pencil stay looking like pencil. Often I don't use any blending stump or anything on my color pencil work because when I was in college and was studying was was majoring in art and doing a lot of color pencil illustration I just love the texture that it makes on the paper so I didn't worry about it too much and I have not really stressed out about it being perfectly blended because if I want that look I'll go to my Copic Markers. So I like to let pencil be pencil and I'm making a horse that has some spots on them I was kind of trying to decide whether I like that spot on his back or not and I do end up removing that later because it's kind of a little jarring tiny spot there but overall I'm trying to keep my colors in harmony with each other so I didn't pull out every pencil known to man when I was doing this I have the same red on the sled and on the bunnies scarf and hat as well as the jingle bells and the the reins and stuff on the horse and I'm using black for the horse to reflect the black on the bunnies hat and just to kind of keep all of that harmonious so here I'm repairing taking out that spot because I decided that was no fun to have that over there now for the tree portion the slow it down here a little bit and you can decide what you want the shape of your tree to be I wanted the tree to look like it's kind of hanging almost in a little curved way out the back of the sled so I'm making the big fat part right next to the bunny and then it's going to get toward the skinnier part if you want it to stand more upright you could also do that and just create that shape notice that I didn't draw a hard outline for it because I'm going to be able to refine the shape as I go and decide is it big enough do I have enough color here do I want more color here and not having a hard outline means I don't have to make that decision right now until I see what it starts to look like I'm using the side of the blending stump instead of only the tip and that's gonna for one make it faster and blend more area more quickly but it also gives me a different really soft look so you can tell there's a different type of blending that happens in that wider area and then I'm going back in with more colored pencil you can do this right away you don't have to wait for it to dry or anything and then start to add more color I want richer darker color right behind the bunny so he pops out forward from the tree and that kind of sinks into the the deeper part of the sled and then more open spaces as I work my way toward the top and I'm keeping my lines kind of in the same direction as where my tree is going to be flowing to because that's going to increase the look of it kind of tumbling down the side like I'm trying to do for for this particular card so you want more color on the bottom side more heavier darker color because that's going to make it look like the top part is the lightest part now here's where I decided to make it bigger I wanted a bigger tree so I added more pencil lines and I got my blending stump back out and then I can soften those edges again and you can go back and forth with this a number of times to refine your tree and get it just right then I went in with a really dark gray pencil I tend not to try to use too much black if I can help it because a dark gray is going to give you something more natural there's very few things in life in the world that are pure black but I'm putting my shadows deep into the sled as well as on the bottom side of the whole shape of the tree so that I get that sense that it's a nice big heavy old tree for the finishing off of this one I'm going to add a tree line in the background and that I'm also going to allow to be just pencil I'm not going to do any blending on it so I need to do some nice pencil work that means keeping my pencil nice and sharp filling in all the little spots and stuff so that I have a nice really simple graphic Bank of Trees and to make a tree and colored pencil just make a triangle with fuzzy edges to it basically and people's eye will fill that in so if you're not sure you know how to draw a pine tree it's not that hard just give people a suggestion of it and their mind will fill it in they're going to be busy looking at the bunny and the horse and the sleigh and the Christmas tree and nobody's gonna care about whether your trees are perfect in the background it's just giving a setting for it and it's also putting color around the horse because I wanted some white legs and white nose on my horse and you've got that little white tail of the bunny there's some white spots that are going to look more white when they have color in with them I even added a little bit more shadow underneath the tail there while I was looking at that I wanted to add a little bit of motion to this the horse kind of looks like he's standing still but I wanted to give it the feel of being out in the snow that they're they're carting this thing and they're moving and so I took a white pen and started adding snow if you add one big cloud then it looks like they're just kind of really rushing but if you do it in small clumps and almost give them an angle like a little bit of a linear look then it will give it more motion you'll see that a little bit more when I show you the other card in just a minute but you can just add some extra snow at the bottom that gives it the idea of motion even though they're technically standing probably pretty still by the look of the horse but here's the tractor and you can see the snow and the way that I kind of made the snow kind of tip up you can also see the difference between a fully blended tree and a not blended tree so one on the right has more blending going and the snow line is still the same in both of them and in the background of this one I did some powdered pencil which is a technique taught in the colored pencil jumpstart class so there you go two fun little cards and two different ways to make a tree look either really soft like the the one here in the tractor picture and just do more of the blending with the blending stump or with the sled you can let each one of those pine needles almost show so you get much more texture and when you combine that with the blended texture of the bunny it just looks really nice on a Christmas card so be sure to go check out the new release I'll have links in the doobly-doo and over on my blog to the new release and you can see lots more by purple onion and I will talk to you guys later take care and have an awesome day